Teacher Certification Slug-Fest, Final Rounds

Days 4&5 of my back-and-forth on the merits of teacher certification are now posted at Edspresso. In all seriousness, less of a fight than an interesting conversation, for which my fellow debater deserves much credit. There are also some worthwhile extra perspectives in the comments section.

SMART Snags

There have been a lot of stories this week about the no-so-smart federal SMART grants. The National Science and Mathematics Access to Retaining Talent (SMART) grant program offers $4,000 to eligible students who are majoring in an eligible field of study. It's these devilish "eligibility" details that have caused the recent problems.

First, as detailed by InsideHigherEd.com, more than a hundred students at Utah State University were told they were eligible for the $4,000 grants only to hear a week later that they were not. Apparently they are ineligible because they had taken too many credit hours to qualify (seniors are eligible only if they've taken between 90-120 credits). So it seems seniors are only seniors if they've taken just the required number of credits. The Utah State U website now clarifies this for prospective SMART grantees.

And in other SMART grant mishaps, you'll be happy to know that evolutionary biology is back! The Chronicle's articles on Tuesday and then today provide the full story, which is basically that the list of eligible majors for the SMART grant managed somehow to leave out evolutionary biology. Tough one to miss considering how hot the topic of evolution has been lately. But all's well that end's well. The Dept of Ed has released a statement explaining the oversight and evo-bio is now happily sandwiched between marine biology and environmental biology on the revised list.

New Quick-and-Edster

Note: the post below is the first on the Quick and the Ed from Erin Dillon, a newly-arrived policy analyst at Education Sector. Erin comes to the organization from New York, NY, where she worked as a research associate at the Beginning with Children Foundation, helping with a college preparatory program for high school students and managing a research project examining charter school students' academic achievement. Prior to that, she received her master's in Social Sciences in Education at Stanford University. Look for more posts from Erin in the future.

Help for High Performing Schools

The Washington Post ran an article today on how students in Montgomery County, Maryland did on the state's High School Assessment (HSA), which for the first time is being used as a high-stakes exit exam for this year's sophomore class. The good news is that the school system plans to implement special programs at low-performing schools, and that the evidence suggests that such programs can be greatly beneficial. But those plans also raise the question of whether some students will be short-changed because, paradoxically, they have what every parent wants for their child: a place in a high-performing school.

In 2005, only 26.5% of students at Kennedy High School passed algebra. After a year of interventions, including extra instructional time before and after school and at lunch, and a $150,000 program designed specifically to target algebra, that rate jumped dramatically, to 67.6%, the schools’ highest scores since 2002. The moral being that there is hope in intensive interventions and additional resources for students who need them. High school exit exams don’t necessarily have to result in low-income and minority students missing out on a high school diploma.

At Walt Whitman high school, by contrast, the 2006 passing rate in Algebra was much higher, 80.7%. Scores for most specific groups of students were strong: 70% of Hispanic females passed, as did 100% of Asian females. But the African American passing rate at Whitman was 33.3%, a decrease from 2004 and 2005.

A spokesman for the school system said that "special programs will be put in place at schools where significant numbers of students failed to pass the exams." Let's hope those programs are also extended to students at schools like Whitman where high averages mask huge achievement gaps. The numbers at Kennedy High School suggest that interventions work. Students shouldn't miss them simply because they're lucky enough to be in a "high performing" school.

College Is Not a Dating Service

Andy tries to lure me into commenting on this U.S. News story (in the much-critiqued "America's Best Colleges") about the increasing female dominance on college campuses. Ok, I'll take the bait. Here's how the story kicks off:

The University of La Verne sits on 26 acres of suburbia between the city of Los Angeles and the mountains. It's a small place, with just over 1,600 students, most of whom live in three drab and boxy-looking dormitories. A decade ago, one was exclusively male, one was female, and one was coed. But faced with a surge in women students (who made up 65 percent of the student body last year, up from 58 percent a decade ago), the school had to convert two thirds of the male facility for women's use. "Everyone knows guys are scarce on this campus," says Nick Solis, a sophomore, who adds that the women in his coed dorm have taken to using the men's room out of convenience.

For starters, let's just point out that this school is an anomaly. Across all colleges and universities in the U.S., the average male-female breakdown for traditional-age undergraduates is about 55% female to 45% male. (Women strongly outnumber men among older, non-traditional students, which is part of why the CUNY system, to which the author refers in the piece and which has 35% of students over 25, is about 2/3 female.) That's still not parity, and the 60/40 female/male ratio among black students is concerning to many people. Butthis school is clearly an extreme.

The article trots through all the typical statistics and explanations about why women outnumber men in college, but it's main focus is on how (and why) some colleges are now going out of their way to recruit more men, and, in some instances, appear to be using pro-male affirmative action to do so.

Why are colleges trying to recruit more men?

The university experience, after all, is only partially about academics, and students strongly consider campus climate when choosing where to apply. Anecdotal evidence suggests that once a campus reaches a certain ratio, say 60-40 women to men, both females and males are less likely to apply. "Frankly, students care about the dating scene on campus and no one wants to be outnumbered," says Bari Norman, a former admissions counselor at Barnard College who now runs mycollegecounselor.com.

You see, college isn't really about getting an education. It's about the social life. And that means dating. And, potentially, finding a future mate. (As U.S. News so helpfully points out, "already researchers are thinking ahead to the long-term implications of a shortage of suitably educated peers for women to marry.") Leave aside that most college students today don't actually "date." They hook up. And, while I certainly knew girls in college who were really there to get the MRS. degree (I went to Vanderbilt), that's not why most people go to college (after all, no one ever argued that the Citadell or VMI should go co-ed because the crappy dating scene and lousy chances of finding a wife there were hurting male recruitment). People do still talk about college as if it's a place to find a future mate, but that's not the reality for most people: The median age at first marriage in the U.S. is 25 for women and 27 for men, and it's older than that for those who completed college.

Of course, as Kevin and others have pointed out, since prospective college students don't currently have access to information to tell them which college they might learn the most at, or which has the best record placing people in good jobs in their desired field, they've got to rely on other information, such as reputation, wealth and selectivity (what U.S. News measures), how nice the dorms or rec center are; and, yeah, the potential dating scene.

But the real meat of the story (to the extent there is any) is in the discussion of whether colleges are accepting less-impressive male applicants over more qualified women in an effort to maintain gender parity. For obvious reasons, no college wants to admit that they're doing this, but the differential acceptance rates for males and females that the author trots out from several schools are quite striking. There are reasons, though, to proceed with some caution here. For starters, the competitive colleges the article cites represent only a tiny share of the college market. Top-ranked schools like the Ivies have near-parity in applicants and admissions rates for the genders. And the vast majority of college students in the U.S. go to noncompetitive schools that accept pretty much everyone who applies. Its also possible that some of these colleges are rejecting more women because more women from lower on the academic achievement distribution are applying to them.

But I wonder if articles like this contribute to something of a vicious cycle. Although there's no evidence, a persistent theme--on both sides--in debates about why women are outstripping men on some academic indicators seems to be that at least some groups of women are more determined and are working harder because they've gotten a message that they need to do so in order to compete economically, provide for their future families, etc. It would be ironic if, as a result, prestige colleges really did start requiring women to be much better than men to be admitted.

Teacher Certification Brouhaha

Day 3, at Edspresso. Ritchey and Carey duel over Teach For America, whether or not teacher certification has entered the 21st--or even 20th--Century. Carey lays down an evidentiary challenge.

Teacher Certification Ultimate Fighting Championship

Round 2 between me and David Ritchey, in the eight-sided ring.

NCLB Makes Children Fat

Or so says Cnn.com, which as of 3:00PM EST today is leading with a story titled "P.E. shrinks, waistlines bulge," complete with this picture of President Bush:

Just to make sure the point is clear, the teaser paragraph is as follows:

School-age children are growing fatter, but most states are failing to provide them with enough physical education, according to a report by the American Heart Association and the National Association for Sport and Physical Education. Critics contend the legislation meant to bolster academic standards -- President Bush's No Child Left Behind program -- may be a culprit.

The article recites the standard-issue "narrowing" critique of NCLB: because it focuses more attention on the core skills of math and reading, it focuses less attention on everything else, like, for example, phys-ed. It's a reasonable problem to worry about, and on some level probably an unavoidable consequence of working harder on basic skills. But as is often the case, there's less here than meets the eye.

The article quotes the report's citation of this statistic: "The percentage of students who attend a daily physical education class has dropped from 42 percent in 1991 to 28 percent in 2003." But this isn't an original finding, the report cites a previous study published by the Centers for Disease Control in 2004. You can see that study here. It found the following:

1) the proportion of students attending PE class daily declined significantly during 1991--1995 and did not change during 1995--2003 and 2) the proportion of students exercising or playing sports for >20 minutes during PE class 3--5 days per week did not change significantly during 1991--2003.

In other words, the decline in daily PE class attendance that Cnn.com is prominently hanging on NCLB concluded seven years before NCLB was enacted. And by another measure PE hasn't declined at all.

Charter Schools Rising

Big front-page WaPo story today about charter schools in the District of Columbia--which enrolled about 25 percent of the District's public school students in 2005-06 and will likely increase their share with the opening of 6 new schools this fall. For the most part, this was a pretty good article about the growth of charter schools in the past decade (D.C.'s charter movement turns 10 this year) and the impacts, positive, negative and minimal on DCPS.

I was a bit annoyed, though, by the amount of traction the Post gave Save our Schools, a DC-area anti-charter group. The article presented three of SOS's major arguments: First, that charter schools are hurting public schools by taking away funds; second, that charters are resegregating DC schools; and finally, as SOS leader Gina Arlotto so eloquently expressed it in the Post, "the charters stink, too."

Let's look at these arguments one by one. D.C.'s per-pupil weighted funding formula means that, yes, when a child switches from a DCPS school to a charter, the funding follows. But, DCPS also no longer has to bear the costs of educating that child. Certainly from the perspective of an invididual school, which may lose only a few students and has fixed costs, this is cold comfort. But it's important not to forget that spending on DCPS has also increased substantially since the charter law was passed, meaning that most DCPS schools are getting more per pupil now even though they serve fewer pupils. Not to mention analysis showing that, SOS rhetoric about pro-charter favoritism aside, charters actually receive less public funds per pupil than DCPS. (For various reasons, it may not seem like that at the individual school level within DCPS, but that's a DCPS system problem, not a charter school problem).

Then there's the resegregation issue. I find the claim inherently bizarre, since it would be pretty darn hard for DCPS to get more segregated than it already is. The real criticism isn't that charter schools are resegregating DCPS so much as that a few charter schools are attracting some white students. Both charter critics and the Post article ignored the vast majority of DC charters that serve a higher percentage of minority kids than the District at large to focus on two--Two Rivers and Capital City--that, at least in part because of where they are located, serve a much higher percentage of white students than the District's schools overall. But it's not like either of these schools is a lily-white enclave: Two Rivers, on Capitol Hill, is more than half black and 7 percent Hispanic, and Capital City, which is located in Columbia Heights, is about one-third each white, black, and Hispanic. And given that DCPS's nearly 85 percent African American enrollment and housing patterns mean most black kids in DCPS will be attending nearly all-black schools, attracting more white kids into the system seems like a way to reduce segregation for at least some DCPS students, not increase it.

Not to mention that for a lot of more affluent families choosing charter schools, the alternative wouldn't be to attend a DCPS school, unless they're among the fortunate few that can get into highly-regarded programs like the Capitol Hill Cluster School (where, by the way, Arlotto and other SOS activists send their kids--they wouldn't send them to a run of the mill D.C. school either, for all they want to deny parents who can't afford to live in their school boundaries better options) or the schools west of Rock Creek Park--instead it's sending their kids to an expensive private school or moving to Virginia or Maryland.

It's worth noting a major point the Post's analysis of declining DCPS enrollments overlooked: DCPS enrollment was falling long before charters came on the scene, and when you combine charter and DCPS enrollment, the decline in D.C.'s public school enrollment has actually slowed since charters came on the scene, suggesting that charters are helping D.C. keep more of the young families it needs to grow and thrive. This is why, as long as there's no definitive evidence that charters are discriminating in admissions or counseling out some kids, I don't have a problem with charter schools seeking to attract middle-class families of any race back into the city's public schools. Building more of the kind of public schools those families want to send their kids to also expands opportunities for less advantaged kids in D.C., and keeping those families in the District is important for long-term economic development, civic life, and stability. And, I have to admit, I have a bit of a personal interest here: I love this city, I love living here, and, if I'm ever so fortunate as to have children of my own, I'd really like to be able to send them to a public school in D.C.--and NOT one that's west of Rock Creek Park.

The strongest criticism folks can level against charter schools in D.C. right now is on quality--like DCPS the District's charter schools, on average, are performing far less well than they need to be. But the most recent data shows that charters are outperforming DCPS across the board; the District's authorizers are making progress closing down the lowest-performing schools, which should also improve quality; and some of D.C.'s charter schools are very good schools. But it's still not good enough, and everyone involved in the District's charter school community needs to keep working to improve quality and performance, because our kids and our city depend on it.

Teacher Certification Smack-Down

I'm debating David Ritchie, Executive Director of the Association of Teacher Educators, over at Edspresso this week. The topic is teacher certification--he's for, I'm against, although I think the debate will end up being a little more nuanced than that. Come have a look.

Mathews Gets It Right

Don't miss Jay Mathews' terrific op-ed in the Post this morning, which comprehensively debunks the "academically over-stressed teenager" meme as expressed in Alexandra Robbins' new book, "The Overachievers." Mathews notes that the allegedly typical high schooler consumed by homework, academics, and other activities focused on admission to an Ivy League school is largely a mirage, confined to the small fraction of the overall population, and that many of the statistics used to support that idea are mistaken or overblown. "The real national problem," Mathews says, "is not that we ask most teens to do too much, but too little."